Crossfield Systems
An IT support and infrastructure practice on West Sam Houston Parkway, working with organizations across Houston and the Gulf Coast.
Why we log everything
Crossfield Systems was founded to support business IT environments that could be understood by the people who own them.
Our engineers had all worked at providers using a single shared administrator account across the whole support team. It is convenient, it is common, and it means that six months later nobody can establish who made a change or why.
The difficulty is not carelessness. An engineer under pressure fixes the problem in front of them. Documenting it is unpaid, invisible work that benefits somebody else at an unspecified future date.
The bill arrives during an incident. An outage traced to a change made eighteen months earlier by an unknown person is substantially harder to resolve than the same outage with a readable history.
So we removed the shared account entirely. Each engineer holds a named administrative account in the client’s own directory, created and revocable by the client, and every action is attributable in the client’s own logs without reference to anything we say.
And we write up changes made outside tickets. Routine maintenance, adjustments noticed in passing, and anything corrected without a request. That category is the one that ordinarily disappears.
What every client can expect
Named accounts only
Each engineer has their own administrative account in your directory. We never accept a shared credential.
Accounts you control
Created by you, revocable by you, at any time and without notice to us.
Every change recorded
Including changes made outside a ticket, during maintenance, or corrected in passing.
Our errors included
Mistakes we make and correct are written up in the same log as everything else.
Documentation in your name
Environment records, licences, and vendor accounts held in your files throughout.
Restores tested
On a schedule, with your team present, because a backup nobody has restored is an assumption.
The first sixty days
Discovery. We document what you actually have: servers, network equipment, cloud tenants, line-of-business applications, licences, and the vendor relationships behind each. This is usually the first time an organization sees all of it in one place.
Account setup. You create named administrative accounts for each of our engineers. We do not receive an existing credential and we do not ask for one.
Baseline record. The environment is recorded as found, before we change anything, so that the change log has a starting point that is not simply our word for it.
Risk list. We produce a written list of what we consider urgent, what can wait, and what we would leave alone. Items we would leave alone are included, because a provider that recommends fixing everything is not exercising judgement.
Handover of documentation. Everything produced during discovery goes into your records at the end of the period, whether or not the relationship continues.
Who you will work with
Mason Redford
IT Support Specialist
Handles client support and maintains the change record on the accounts he holds. Mason runs the discovery process on new client environments and produces the baseline documentation.
Managing Director
Leadership
Founded the firm and set the named-account policy it operates under. Reviews the monthly change summary before it goes to clients.
Infrastructure Manager
Infrastructure
Nineteen years in server, network, and identity management across the Gulf Coast, including several years in regulated energy environments.